I'm probably using more Linux than ever. My laptop runs Fedora. I'm the admin on a server running CentOS.

I will keep doing those things.

But today I unsubscribed from most of the mailing lists that have been flowing through my Gmail account over the past few years.

The Debian, Fedora, Xubuntu and Lubuntu users list? All gone. So are the development lists for Debian, Fedora and Xubuntu, and most of the others. I'm keeping a few low-volume lists. For now anyway.

I was always more of a lurker than active participant on all of those mailing lists.

Lately, and probably before that, I didn't find much of value in most of that mail. Even though the quality of the Fedora lists is a bit higher than average, I wasn't getting a whole lot out of them. I'd scan the mail, maybe read one or two posts every few days, then delete the whole lot.

At this point, I see my operating system as a tool. To get things done.

I'm not interested in Linux evangelism. If you want to use it, that's great. I still do and will do.

If not, that's cool. Do what makes you happy.

I'm still a satisfied user of Linux. It's pretty much all I've run on my laptops since maybe 2009, and I messed around a whole lot with it before that, starting in late 2006 if I remember correctly.

There's more to life.

There's my family. I sure as hell want to do better where they're concerned.

Putting together coherent sentences? I'm still very much interested.

I've threatened to write about more than Linux for years. I'd like to write about things that aren't technology. It's been in the sidebar of this particular blog for as long as I've been writing it.

I see the "tech guy" on the morning news, and I wince. Is that me? Other than the fact that I'm very obviously not on TV, I worry that it is.

There's more to life than gadgets and apps.

That being said (there's always a that being said) ...

It sounds like I'm just on the other end of the same pool, but lately programming has dominated what little free time I have. I read a whole lot about it. And occasionally do it. Maybe I'll be able to tip the scales toward more doing in the near future.

I've been playing with Go, Perl, Python and Ruby. I need to focus.

Coding is what interests me at the moment.

What I'm not playing with are Linux distributions. I don't burn ISOs of anything, don't install just to see what something's like.

New releases of obscure distributions, or even not-so-obscure ones? I'm just not into it.

The ins, outs, politics and boiling pots of the Linux world? Not interested.

Give me my working Fedora system (or maybe Debian if the hardware is willing) and let me do my work, write my code, live my life.

If that sounds melodramatic, so be it.

I reserve the right to change my mind. But for now, I'm 50 other things first and a Linux user after that.

After many months during which the FileZilla FTP client would eat a ton of CPU and basically stop working in Fedora, whatever was wrong has been fixed, and the program is working once again.

After a FileZilla update caused the problem (and yes, I did contribute to the bug report), I set up gFTP because I need a working FTP client. And gFTP gets the job done. It's super fast. It's also not actively developed.

Maybe I'll go back to FileZilla. Maybe not. But it's nice to have the option.

I've been playing with the idea of using Ode as both a traditional blogging system as well as a social platform, generating exactly the kinds of posts that I normally would originate on social media sites like Twitter.

With the help of dlvr.it, this is entirely possible with not just Ode but pretty much any blogging platform.

The key to this concept is that my social-media updates should originate on my system, where they will continue to live. They would be mine. Twitter will have a copy, but I will have the "original."

And now I can tell you that it's easy to do this. And it doesn't just work for Ode but can be done on any blogging platform (including WordPress) that allows you to post to categories and tap into RSS for that specific category.

For the Ode people, I'm thinking of using EditEdit, Ode's de facto GUI, to do these quick updates.

Ode project leader Rob Reed and I have discussed adding Twitter-like (or, to be suitably generic, microblogging-like) speed and ease to Ode (or any filesystem-based blogging program, for that matter), and a simplified, mobile-enabled version of EditEdit would be a great way to do that. Or a mobile app that (for my purposes and on my Ode workflow) generates the proper text file, uploads it, reindexes the blog for Indexette and rebuilds my archive page.

The "disconnect" between "regular" blog posts and social/microblogging updates are that a blog post traditionally contains a title and then a block of text (or a message, if you will), and a "social" update is just the text, with no title.

When you drop this code into a file in a directory (in my case I made the directory web_server and named the file main.go), then either compile it with go build or run it with go run, it creates a web server on port 8080 that serves the contents of your /usr/share/doc directory, which always exists in Linux and Unix (and probably in the Mac OS X version of Unix).

To see the results, open a web browser and go to http://localhost:8080/, and you should see a directory listing. Just like any web page, you can click on the links and see what's in those files.

This example program -- a web server in five lines -- is fun to play around with. You can change the http.Dir and serve "real" web content. You can change the port from :8080 to something else.

Last year I decided to write a short script that outputs the time/date-stamp line required for Ode's Indexette add-in.

Back in 2014, I did it in Perl, Ode's "mother" language. It's really just a two-liner with a whole lot of notes:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# The purpose of this script is to generate a in Perl
# that allows automatic creation and insertion of an Indexette
# tag into an Ode blog post. The tag looks like this:
# tag : Indexette : index-date : 2014 02 17 19:30:42
# This program should produce the above output with the current
# timestamp.
#
# The next task is to get the output into your text editor
# without needing to copy/paste out of the terminal.
#
# To bring the output of this program into the Gedit text editor:
#
# 1. Make sure Gedit's Snippets plugin is installed and active
# 2. In Gedit, under Tools > Manage Snippets, create a new Snippet
# and call it as a shell command like this:
# $(1:/your/path/to/this_script)
# Here is the script:
#
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year) = gmtime();
printf("tag : Indexette : index-date : %04d %02d %02d %02d:%02d:%02d\n", $year+= 1900, $mon+=1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec);
#
# Notes on the script:
# Adding 1900 to get the current year, adding 1 to get the current month

I've been playing around with lots of other languages since then. I know I should stick with one and really learn it, but for now it is what it is.

package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
// get the current time in UTC
indexette_time := time.Now().UTC()
/* print the time to standard output in the format
required by Ode's Indexette add-in. Note that the
.Format parameters use an "old" date just to set
the format, the output will be the current time
due to the use of time.Now() */
fmt.Println("tag : Indexette : index-date :", indexette_time.Format("2006 01 02 15:04:05"))
}

I'm still calling the script into gedit the same way (through Snippets), and it works just as well as the Perl version.

One thing I just learned about go that's pretty cool is you can run your go program as a script, or compile it as a binary and run that. Advantages of a binary are that it's portable -- anybody with a system for which the binary is built can run it without needing to install go on their own system. And the binary should run faster than the script, though this is admittedly not an issue for three lines of code.

But it's cool anyway.

In the case of this script, I named it ode_time. Through experimentation, I figured out that the gobuild program that makes the binaries takes their name from the directory containing the file. So since I wanted the go binary to have the same name as the file, I gave the directory the same name, too:

My script file is here (I'm leaving out most of the path, but suffice it to say this is the place where I keep my program files):

/golang_code/ode_time/ode_time.go

I run the uncompiled script this way while in the /ode_time directory:

$ go run ode_time.go

I get this output:

tag : Indexette : index-date : 2015 06 21 00:52:23

Perfect!

I wanted to make a binary just because.

Here's how I did it. I am working in the /ode_time directory that contains ode_time.go:

$ go build ode_time.go

Now the directory contains two files:

ode_time ode_time.go

The first is the binary (which was automatically made executable by the go build command), and the second is the "raw" go script.

So I can now run the binary from my console like I'd run any binary that isn't in my path:

$ ./ode_time

And I get the same output.

tag : Indexette : index-date : 2015 06 21 00:55:04

The takeaway: I wanted to write a go program, and with the help of the Internet (and people who actually know how to do these things), I did it. And it was a program that I use on a daily basis -- whenever I write a blog post for my Ode system.

I like the idea of go, which is the language used by the Hugo static blogging system. The documentation seemed OK, but I did have to go "off the reservation" to find an example that I could work off of.

I'll clearly have to seek out tutorials and books if I want to pursue programming with go. Fortunately there are a few go books about to be released, and that might help me figure it out.

It's not that I don't like virtual desktops (aka workspaces) in Linux.

On the contrary, I love them.

But when I'm using the horrible Citrix-delivered applications my company provides, switching to another workspace (or virtual desktop) causes those apps to lose their connection to the server.

So I have to be disciplined in order not to switch to another workspace.

In Xfce I removed the desktop pager from my panel.

And just now in GNOME 3, I was searching for an Extension that would do this for me. I found an out-of-date Extension that included a very good workaround in the comments:

This extension didn't work for me on Fedora 20/GNOME 3.10. Instead I used GNOME Tweak Tool and set the 'Workspace Creation'=Static and only 'Number of Workspaces'=1.

I already have GNOME Tweak Tool, since you really can't run GNOME 3 (successfully anyway) without it. I went into the Workspaces portion of the utility and made the changes.

Now my Workspaces are gone, as is the ability to even go to them with ctrl-alt up/down-arrow, and I should be safer than ever to use GNOME Shell for my Citrix work ... unless minimizing apps, or switching between them, kills the connection.

Update: Switching between applications, including my Citrix-delivered ones, and minimizing them with the Super (aka Windows) key or mousing into the hot corner does NOT cause the Citrix apps to lose their connection to the server.

So we can call this a win. I'll know for sure when I try to do a full day of production in GNOME 3 on Monday.

Here's my short and not so sweet review of [IK Multimedia's iRig 2] guitar interface to the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and some Samsung Android devices.

The iRig 2 was floating around the office, and I figured that I'm a guitar player, I've always been interested in headphone-amp type solutions, and maybe this would enable me to play an electric guitar, with the aid of my iPod Touch 5th Generation, and leave amplifiers behind.

Here's the challenge: I play jazz mostly. I don't like distortion. Jazz guitar for the most part requires a lot of headroom but no distortion.

Can the iRig 2 handle it?

First of all, the iRig 2 is an inexpensive device. It's something like $39. That's cheap. So how much can you expect from it? How good is the onboard preamp?

I wasn't even going to write about how I used to run Citrix on Windows 8 instead of Linux on my HP laptop because my particular Citrix-delivered application reacted poorly to the horrible DSL Extreme broadband service at home and its frequent (every three minutes or so) total dropouts. Maddeningly, the crucial link to "reconnect" to my application was present the Firefox and Chrome web browsers under Windows but absent in those same browsers under Linux.

No, I was instead going to write about how to configure Citrix in Linux to allow you to access local drives via your Citrix apps. I'd like to thank the Ubuntu community for that very helpful portion of an overall Citrix-on-Linux page that has helped me many times.

But since I'm already going this road, here is how and why I decided to do my Citrix-based production work in Fedora Linux instead of Windows 8.

Initially I thought I "had" to use Windows for the ungainly Citrix-delivered apps that my employer requires, including Adobe InCopy (which I wouldn't wish on anybody) and a proprietary CMS from Hell. That was when I was having Internet issues at home and kept getting disconnected from my Citrix apps.

But since then I've "solved" my broadband issue, and the connection is slow yet consistent (as opposed to slightly faster but extremely inconsistent; thanks DSL Extreme, who I'm dropping as soon as my contract ends).

So once I had "consistent" broadband, I thought I was home free. I could run my Citrix apps under Windows 8 (the 8.1 upgrade fails for me every time, probably because I dual-boot Fedora, and an encrypted Fedora at that) and all would be well.

Except that Win 8 started crashing. Yeah, I'm stressing the #$%& out of it, but that's how I work.

I installed the LXDE desktop environment a while back. Part of me just wanted to check it out because it has been awhile. But I also was "auditioning" it as a potential working environment in Fedora because I'm now doing a lot more of my $dayjob work via Citrix Receiver in Linux instead of Windows.

As a current Xfce user, moving to LXDE isn't quite the culture shock as it would be going from, say GNOME or KDE to the LXDE environment.

Things I liked in LXDE included that it picked up on the Adiwata Dark theme I'm using in GNOME and had a lot more "darkness" to it than Xfce picks up when I choose Adiwata on that side and Adiwata Dark in GNOME. Doing the latter makes GTK3 apps show up with a dark theme, though all GTK2 apps are as white as the Xfce Adiwata theme makes them.

Things I didn't like included a lack of screen animation when clicking an application button in a panel (I never knew if I really clicked it or not) and (more crucially) no way to manage touchpad tap-to-click in a GUI.

Yeah, it came down to touchpad management. Xfce is good at it. LXDE is not.

So I stopped using LXDE, barely used GNOME 3 (too many issues with Citrix and too hard to configure the way I want/need it to be) and focused on Xfce as my go-to desktop environment.

I recently removed the desktop pager from my upper panel to keep myself from accidentally clicking into a second desktop and causing my Citrix apps to lose their connection to the server. It's barbaric. But I can accept it.

And now LXDE has been hanging around unused on my Fedora system for more than a little time.

I figured, why not remove it?

So I went into my favorite Fedora package manager, searched for LXDE and removed everything that came up.

Bad move.

There were things in that mass package removal that Xfce needs.

After that ill-fated software removal, Xfce lost its wallpaper. And its ability to pretty much work at all. Applications would launch, but they would no longer refresh on the screen. And I couldn't do much of anything.

How did I set things right?

I went into Yumex again -- yes, it did work -- and added back all of the LXDE items.

In my first entry about ONLYOFFICE, which is both a software-as-a-service offering you can purchase for individuals or teams and software you can install on your Linux system via traditional package or Docker containers, a key piece of the puzzle was missing.

That piece was the "document server," which allows users to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations through the web browser in real time.

*Online Document Editors aren't included into the Community Server solution and will be available soon as a separate installation, however now you can download the previous version.

Without the "online document editors," what's left?

I certainly want to try ONLYOFFICE on their hosted service. The world is crying out for collaborative tools that aren't controlled by Google/Apple/Microsoft.

At my day job, we've been using Slack to collaborate and mostly cut down on email. Probably half the attraction is that Slack is not part of a massive corporate entity.

Any of the biggies -- Google, Microsoft, Apple -- could have done what Slack is doing. They still could. It's pretty simple. And that's one of the main reasons why Slack is so compelling. I expect Slack to do much more as time goes on. I also expect somebody big to make an offer to buy Slack outright.

Like Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, Slack is a hosted service. It has to stay that way to monetize. Or so it seems.

Companies like mine are happy to use hosted services. We are deep in Google (Docs/Drive/Mail). A large part of the attraction is not having to host, troubleshoot or maintain the software or the servers. Many companies large and small don't think of IT as part of their core business and would rather farm it out to Google, Amazon or Microsoft (and often all three). Or it comes down to cost. The cloud can be cheaper. Or at least those costs are consistent.

But there are other people, entities and companies that desperately want to host and run their own services and keep everything under local control.

Just because it's a cloud world doesn't mean we don't want our own cloud (even if OwnCloud isn't quite the way to do it).

If ONLYOFFICE lives up to the hype, it could be a player for those who want to collaborate using web-based apps while retaining total control over their work.

It basically says, "Get rid of HPLIP, don't use the foo2zjs driver with your distro, and instead go to the source, compile it yourself, add the firmware and go to town.

So I did just that. I went to http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/. First I used my favorite Fedora package manager, Yumex, to get rid of HPLIP and foo2zjs (the latter from RPM Fusion, if I'm correct).

During the process, I also had to get rid of system-config-printer-udev to get hot-plugging set up.

I downloaded the foo2zjs source from http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/, followed the instructions for compiling it, getting the HP LaserJet 1020 firmware, configuring hotplugging and restarting the CUPS spooler.

Then I started Fedora's system-config-printer GUI (which you can start from the menu as Administration - Print Settings or at the console with system-config-printer, sent out a test page, which worked (!!!), and the proceeded to print a document out of gedit, which also worked.

The question now is, will this loveliness survive a reboot?

Later: This configuration does survive a reboot. And a suspend/resume.

SELinux trouble?: If SELinux throws an error when you plug in your USB printer, follow the utility's instructions for allowing an exception for your printer.

There are 500+ more comments over at Reddit, and the thread is well worth reading.

My $.02

I neither need nor can afford the Adobe Creative Suite. I use GIMP, Inkscape, Gthumb, Irfanview under Wine, OpenShot (and I hope to pick up KDEnlive).

If I needed Microsoft Office, I could run it under Wine or in a VM. (Now I do most things in Google Docs/Spreadsheets or LibreOffice, if not in a local text editor)

I am a Linux hobbyist, and meeting the little challenges required to set up a computer with Linux is something that I enjoy. Yes, I'm probably a glutton for punishment. And things are never as smooth as billed in the "other" OSes (Windows and OS X).

There will always be Linux distributions that will work on my hardware and have timely security and bug-fix support. Windows is OK at this, but Apple sucks hard by orphaning hardware with no regrets (on their part, anyway).

Buried in this blog post is a great tip: Using the Apache web server utility ab to determine web site availability and speed.

Definitely check out the post (which is about hosting static sites on Amazon S3), and if you are interested, install ab, which comes bundled for Debian/Ubuntu-style Linux systems in apache2-utils and for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS-style systems in httpd-tools.

The article linked above gives you the command to install apache2-utils in Ubuntu/Debian, and I could provide a similar yum command for Fedora/CentOS, but you probably already know how to install packages both from the command line and a GUI, right?

(I'm not sure how you'd get the Apache utilities in Mac OS X or Windows -- maybe someone else knows.)

Once you have the appropriate package installed (I already had it and didn't even know it), you just run the ab program from a terminal. This line hits my site with 1,000 requests:

Note: So how did Ode do in this test? Very well. The site carries Javascript for Disqus and the Twitter and Google Plus counters, so it's not as light as it could be, and the speeds are no slower than for my entirely static sites on this same shared-hosting server.

And it also shows that Ode can easily handle 1,000 simultaneous requests. Not bad at all.

So I'm looking for PulseAudio-related software today, and I come across PulseCaster, a Python application created by former Fedora Project Leader (and current Red Hat employee) Paul Frields.

It's a simple app. On Linux systems equipped with PulseAudio (which these days is most of them), it will record both sides of a conversation you are having on any application that pushes that audio over PulseAudio. The default is recording both sides of the conversation to a single OGG file. There is an "advanced" setting that records each side of the the conversation as a separate, uncompressed WAV file.

It's a simple app, and I can tell you that it works well. The wiki suggests that you use it with VOiP apps like Ekiga and Twinkle. Let me tell you now that it also works just fine with the non-free, freedom-hating Skype.

If you wanted to record a podcast, or just a VoIP call with someone else (and yes, PulseCaster warns you not to record without the other party's permission), it couldn't be easier than this.

PulseCaster is packaged for Fedora, but you can get the code from the links on the project home page (which is generated out of GitHub).

Almost all the tutorials on tap-to-click for LXDE are on how to turn it off, mostly in Lubuntu.

I've just started experimenting with LXDE in Fedora 21 and was surprised to find out that I can toggle tap-to-click in the configuration of Xfce but not in LXDE, where there is no tap-to-click out of the box.

I repeat: There is seemingly no GUI way to toggle tap-to-click in LXDE. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear I am not.

There is more than one way to turn tap-to-click on with scripts, or modifying xorg.conf or files in xorg.conf.d.

I just wanted something simple. I turned to the synclient utility (using it in the terminal).

First of all you can use synclient to check your setup:

$ synclient -l

And to turn on tap-to-click:

$ synclient TapButton1=1

Like I say above, there are ways to do this via Xorg, and probably other ways, too.

I'm not sure whether or not there is a GUI in LXDE to autostart scripts, but I notice that one of the choices in LXDE's Desktop Session Settings is Xfsettingsd, the Xfce Settings Daemon. Could that bring some of my Xfce settings into LXDE? It's probably worth a try.

But for now, just running synclient TapButton1=1 in the terminal gets me where I want to be.

"Bobbing for Influence" by former Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, now community manager for XPrize, is an insightful look at a problem affecting many communities.

And if you don't recognize your organization, be it a family, project or company, as a community, you're doing it wrong.

Jono's articla is all about how rigid observance of hierarchy can really kill a company's culture, mission and even bottom line. The worst is when your boss/CEO/etc. thinks that acting like Steve Jobs is going to work. Steve Jobs was a genius. And an asshole. (The chances that you're a genius are slim. And the idea that genius only thrives when mashed up with asshole is stupid. Steve Jobs was an edge case who made thousands of other guys mock-turtle it up and steamroll everybody in their path. Not good.)

Be that as it may, Jono says it better:

A big chunk of the problems many organizations face is around influence. More specifically, the problems set in when employees and contributors feel that they no longer have the ability to have a level of influence or impact in an organization, and thus, their work feels more mechanical, is not appreciated, and there is little validation.

Now, influence here is subtle. It is not always about being involved in the decision-making or being in the cool meetings. Some people won’t, and frankly shouldn’t, be involved in certain decisions: when we have too many cooks in the kitchen, you get a mess. Or Arby’s. Choose your preferred mess.

The influence I am referring to here is the ability to feed into the overall culture and to help shape and craft the organization. If we want to build truly successful organizations, we need to create a culture in which the very best ideas and perspectives bubble to the surface. These ideas may come from SVPs or it may come from the dude who empties out the bins.

The point being, if we can figure out a formula in which people can feel they can feed into the culture and help shape it, you will build a stronger sense of belonging and people will stick around longer. A sense of empowerment like this keeps people around for the long haul. When people feel unengaged or pushed to the side, they will take the next shiny opportunity that bubbles up on LinkedIn.

Jono goes through 10 individual points on the problems of lack of influence in communities. I can think of few people who wouldn't benefit from reading this article. (I sure did.)

I'm coming into this blind. I saw a link to the 8th site and found out that 8th is a while new programming language and development environment that allows you to code once and run on:

Windows

OS X

Linux

Android

iOS

Really?

As the 8th site says:

Program code is only written once, in 8th™, regardless of how many platforms are targeted. The code is then packaged to run on the target operating system, which may be any combination of Windows, OS X, Linux, Android or iOS. Differences between operating systems are handled by 8th™, letting the developer leverage existing knowledge across all platforms.

I don't know enought about 8th, or about what exactly you can code with it, but the idea that these applications are so vigorously cross-platform really gets me thinking. Even just in the mobile space, the ability to code once for both Android and iOS is huge. And add to that all the major desktop OSes (Windows, OS X, Linux), and this could potentially be something.

There IS a catch (and truthfully, I didn't see it coming)

To produce "packaged applications" with 8th, you have to pay $199 per year.

I've been running the Fedora Xfce Spin since F18, and I think it's one of the best-kept secrets in the Xfce-running distro world. It comes well-configured out of the box, looks great, is as cutting-edge as you'd want and really does just work most of the time.

After saying I wouldn't jump into a Fedora 21 upgrade, I rather quickly had a change of heart and mind, ran a Fedup upgrade and am now running Fedora 21 on my go-to HP Pavilion g6 laptop.

With Wayland.

Yep, one of the new features of the GNOME 3.14-running Fedora 21 is a preview of the next-generation, post-X Window Wayland display manager, and you can choose "GNOME with Wayland" in the login/session manager.

I'm running Wayland right now. I've heard the caveat many times: Not all applications will work in Wayland. But so far, every application I've tried (Firefox, Gedit, Transmission, FileZilla, VLC, Files/Nautilus, Liferea, Yumex, Google Chrome, Geany, even apps in Wine) has run in Wayland with no trouble.

I've been running Fedora 21 for a few days now, spending most of my time in the non-Wayland world of Xfce and GNOME with X, and the system is as solid as ever. And by that I mean pretty damn solid.

The only glitch I've had with Wayland has been in suspend/resume, which is pretty touchy anyway with my hardware. (I've probably written 50 posts about it since I got this laptop.) When running Wayland, the laptop will suspend and then resume, but I'm seemingly "detached" from my session and have to log in again. At this point I'm logged in twice. This doesn't happen in X. If this is the only thing I can find wrong with Wayland, I'll still consider it pretty remarkable.

Just from a "look and feel" perspective, GNOME 3.14 is working better and faster than version 3.10 did in Fedora 20. I'm not saying I'm going to throw Xfce over for it, but the environment is more usable than ever. I moved to the Adiwata Dark theme while still in F20, and everything looks that much better in F21.

As I've said since I began running Fedora 18 on this laptop and upgrading via Fedup to each subsequent release, a system as forward-looking as Fedora shouldn't be anywhere near as stable as it is. It's a tribute to the developers for Fedora and the many upstream projects that go into the distribution.

Today marks only nine days since Fedora 21 went stable, and my system is running like a well-maintained watch.

So if you think of yourself as the adventurous type, someone who likes everything to be pretty new all the time but doesn't really want to deal with a lot of breakage and is curious about Wayland in the real world, give Fedora 21 a try.

Later: You know what got fixed in Fedora 21 that was broken in F20? Mounting of Apple iOS 8 devices.

So I haven't upgraded my daily-drive Fedora 20 system to Fedora 21, which was released two short days ago.

From what I can see, the RPM Fusion repositories are ready for F21. Google Chrome might break, but a quick removal and reinstall should fix that.

In F21, there will be many changes in the GNOME desktop environment and applications.

But for my go-to desktop environment, Xfce, it's going to be pretty much the same. (Yes, Xfce is moving glacially slow, and I've heard talk of people turning to the GNOME 2-inspired Mate desktop because it's under heavy development.)

My web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) won't fall behind. I get the latest versions from Fedora and Google, respectively.

I'm dabbling in Ruby, and F20 has version 2.0. F21 has 2.1, but at the level I'm at, it doesn't matter.

And now that all the heat is on F21, it's been relatively quiet, update-wise for F20. It's a bit closer to running Debian Stable. After awhile you get a few security patches here and there, but updates are quiet and quick.

Even an old (but still supported) Fedora release gets more updates than a current Debian Stable, but for the moment, I'm enjoying the ritual of staring Yumex and seeing either only a few or, better yet, no updates waiting to be installed.

Sure I'll move to F21. It could be tomorrow (probably not) or next month (you're getting warm). But what's the hurry?

The Node.js server-side Javascript runtime is today’s hot thing. You might say it’s the Ruby on Rails of the ’10s. Where developers used to code in Perl and PHP, then Ruby/Rails, today’s startup-fueled web-development world is all about Javascript on the server, and Node is the grease that makes it all go.

And sitting atop the Node.js heap is Joyent, the company where Node creator Ryan Dahl was working when he came up with the idea and the code to make it run.

So even though Node.js is an open-source project, its direction is largely guided by the for-profit Joyent. And that doesn’t sit so well with some Node users/developers.

As reported in InfoWorld and elsewhere, a group of them just started a fork of Node.js called io.js, which is now living on GitHub and prepared to take the Node code in a community-driven direction.

"We intend to release, with increasing regularity, releases which are compatible with the npm ecosystem that has been built to date for node.js."

As InfoWorld previously reported the Node forking threat has been floating around for awhile, and in response Joyent created an advisory board to get more community input into what has become one of the most-used open-source projects in the world of web-delivered application development.

Fighting, infighting, forking and just plain grumbling is nothing new to open-source projects. Friction over the transition from Python 2 to Python 3, the never-ending gestation of Perl 6, everything about Linux distribution Ubuntu and its SABDFL (self-appointed benevolent dictator for life) Mark Shuttleworth since he moved the buttons from right to left, Debian and the now-raging debate over the systemd init system that’s so much more than an init system … and the beat goes on.

The question is, does Joyent have enough developer (and major corporate) juice to keep Node as the glue holding together today’s Javascript-driven web stack?

The short-term bettor says yes, since Javascript on the server is so “now,” and corporate IT has wrapped its arms firmly around Node. But since Javascript on the server has gone from curiosity to total domination in a few short years, and there’s always something new on the hot-development-tool horizon, it’s anybody’s game.

If the many-horse race over “best Javascript web framework” is any indication, another player in Node’s space is nothing more than the familiar brand of healthy competition that keeps the technology world on its code-slinging toes.

Most forks come to nothing. Just like ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once said in all his sweat-drenched glory, it usually comes down to “developers, developers developers.”

I needed to do a bare-metal install of Fedora 21 today, and I used the beta image for the live Xfce Spin.

I didn’t do anything special. The whole disk was devoted to Fedora. I encrypted everything.

It was probably the quickest Linux install I’ve ever done — even quicker than OpenBSD’s excellent text-based installer, where if you go with the defaults you have a working system within minutes.

Sure Ananconda isn’t “linear” like other installers, but once you get used to its “hub and spoke” logic, you can bring up a Fedora system very, very quickly.

As much as I love Debian, whenever I try to do anything complicated with disk partitioning, I run into trouble. Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer is pretty good, too. But considering the bad press that Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda installer has gotten over the past few years, once you get to know it, you can do installs very quickly and efficiently.

After a year and half, I've finally cracked suspend/resume in Linux on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop (AMD A4-4300M APU with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics) with the open-source Radeon driver.

I've been able to successfully suspend/resume for some time on this laptop with the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver, but two things have prompted me to give that driver up for the open Radeon driver:

1) AMD Catalyst hasn't been packaged for Fedora since Fedora 19, and we're about to see Fedora 21 released with no indication that things will change. There are at least a couple of workarounds that will get Catalyst/fglrx on your Fedora 20 system, both of which I've written about at length, but I'm tired of doing them. While the Catalyst/fglrx experience is somewhat smoother on distributions that are serious about packaging the driver (Debian and Ubuntu come to mind), breakage is inevitable on fast-moving distros like Fedora that get new Linux kernels all the time.

2) While AMD Catalyst allows the laptop to run cooler at idle (I'm pretty sure it runs at a similar temperature under load), the quality of video -- actual videos in applications like VLC, that is -- is better with the latest Radeon driver than with Catalyst. Briefly, when I'm watching something and the image is "moving," it breaks up horizontally in Catalyst, not at all in Radeon.

But suspend/resume trumps all. Having it with Catalyst kept me ... running Catalyst.

Now that I've cracked the code for successful suspend/resume without Catalyst, the infrequently updated, not-packaged-for-Fedora, closed-source driver is fading in my virtual rear-view mirror.

So how do you get suspend/resume working on this particular HP Pavilion g6 (or similarly equipped) laptop?

I've been doing test installs again, among them Debian Jessie, and things don't work as well as they should on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop without a couple of firmware packages that can be installed after a little tweaking.

If you use the "regular" Debian images to install, as I did this time, instead of the harder-to-find, unofficial ones with non-free firmware included, after installation you have to first get into your /etc/apt/sources.list file as root and add the contrib and non-free repositories, update your software sources with apt, and then install the firmware packages.

Here are a fewwebsites that can help if you've never done this before.

Let me just say that if you hope to use Debian for any length of time, you WILL be mucking with /etc/apt/sources.list, so you might as well learn it now.

Once you have contrib and non-free added to your lines in /etc/apt/sources.list, use either su or sudo to update your software sources with apt. Since sudo isn't in the Debian default (though I always install and configure it immediately with visudo), I will give the "recipe" below as if you are using su with the root pasword to get full privileges:

That went well. I had a working GNOME 3 desktop in OpenBSD 5.6. I must say, it is probably more responsive than GNOME 3 in Fedora. It's pretty much like it is in Debian, except for the CPU heat and the fan blowing.

So the combination of excessive heat and fan noise along with poor video performance means I won't be doing much with OpenBSD on this particular laptop.

But it's always instructive to check in on OpenBSD with various hunks of hardware to see how they work together. OpenBSD has always been a project to watch, and I can only hope that hardware compatibility improves as development continues.

After reading about it on one of the Fedora mailing lists, I hunted down and installed the TopIcons extension to GNOME Shell so the Dropbox icon shows up and persists in the upper panel.

So far I'm very happy with it.

I'm experimenting, as it were, with GNOME Shell and the GNOME Classic version of same, now that I'm using the open Radeon video driver and not the closed AMD Catalyst version (the latter of which does not play well with GNOME 3 at this point in time).

I finally did figure out suspend/resume in Radeon on my hardware (which I will write up at some point soon), so I'm able to run GNOME 3/Shell in addition to my go-to desktop Xfce. Suspend/resume has been a little squirrely at times, so I'm experimenting with it more than just a little before I declare myself satisfied with the fix.

Part of this means getting my GNOME Shell Extensions situation together so the environment isn't so user-unfriendly. To me anyway.

As Ubuntu hits its 10th year as a Linux distribution, cause celebre and all-around topic of conversation among the free-software set, Ars Technica takes a look back at what started with release number 4.10, nicknamed Warty Warthog in 2004 and continues today with the version 14.10, named Utopic Unicorn.

I did a Debian Jessie install last week. This was a traditional install on "real" hardware, more specifically a different drive on my daily (HP Pavilion g6) laptop.

As much as I've praised the Debian installer in the past, and I'll praise it a little bit right now, I will also drop it in a hole and throw a shallow layer of dirt over it just because.

First of all, the Debian installer experience seem much the same in Jessie as it was in Wheezy and Squeeze before it. I don't remember it being much different in Etch. That was my first Debian installation, so my memory, hazy as it is, ends there.

My AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx) trouble in Fedora is well-documented. Biggest of the big at this point is that the proprietary AMD driver DOES NOT work with GNOME 3.

The reason for this incompatibility seems to be that GNOME is getting ready for the Wayland display server, and code associated with that move makes GNOME crash when you try to run it under Catalyst/fglrx, which appears to know nothing about the imminent arrival of Wayland. (Note: You can play with Wayland today in Fedora 21. I did so briefly before the whole thing fell apart on me.)

The lack of an easy-to-install (i.e RPM-packaged) proprietary AMD driver has been a problem since the release of Fedora 20 and no doubt is a major factor in why nobody has packaged Catalyst for a Fedora/RHEL-derived distro since.

Yep, there is no RPM-packaged Catalyst for Fedora 20, and it looks like the situation will continue through the Fedora 21 cycle. There is also no Catalyst RPM -- from RPM Fusion or anybody else -- for RHEL/CentOS 7.

I've been saying for the longest time that if you want to run RHEL/CentOS on the desktop and don't want to quickly hit a wall in terms of packages, you need to either run the Stella spin on CentOS, or use the developer of that project's repo to give your existing CentOS/RHEL system what it's otherwise lacking.

Who is that developer? I'm talking about Nux, who not only produced the great CentOS 6-based Stella, but who also offers repositories for RHEL/CentOS 6 and now 7.

The way I look at it, without the Nux repo, you are going to miss a LOT of packages you're accustomed to seeing in Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian that you just don't see in Fedora, EPEL, El Repo and RPM Fusion.

Yep, three extra repos won't give you the desktop packages you need.

But the Nux repo will. And luckily at this point it's got hundreds of packages you might want or need for RHEL/CentOS 7.

The reviews are starting to roll in for the now-alpha Fedora 21 Workstation, and Dietrich T. Schmitz of Linux Advocates likes what he sees so far:

It's a good sign when I find myself smiling, which is what happened after installing Fedora 21 Alpha Workstation.
As I write, and after a week of poking around Fedora Workstation Alpha, I am thinking:
"This is Alpha? It's more production-ready than other general releases I have seen". Seriously Folks, it's that stable.
The most obvious change? Visual.
Fedora Workstation gets the proverbial face lift with GNOME 3.14. And that is what keeps me smiling.

I'm not in Windows 8 so often (except for the past two days) that on the rare occasions when I do load it up I am at all happy to wait a half-hour or more for the machine to shut down because it's downloading and installing dozens of updates.

I turned automatic updates off. When I have time, I'll boot into Windows 8 and do the updates manually.

I had a pretty good day yesterday running the dodgy over-Citrix apps I need for my $Dayjob. But when bandwidth is poor and I keep getting disconnected, the only way I can manage to keep working is to run the Citrix apps in Windows (in my case Windows 8, not even 8.1 because that update went pear-shaped when I tried it months ago).

What happens is the bits on my DSL connection stop flowing for a minute or so, and I get disconnected from my Citrix apps. In Windows, there's an option on the Citrix page in my browser to reconnect to my "paused" resources. That option doesn't exist on the web page in Linux. Could it be because I'm using a slightly older version of Citrix Receiver / Wfica / ICA / Whatever the hell it is in Linux?

All I know is that it's a pain in the ass. When I'm on a "strong" networking connection with a ton of bandwidth, this isn't a problem, and I can probably run the Citrix apps in Linux. But with my not-so-great home "broadband," I need the extra cushion of being able to easily reconnect to my Citrix apps in order to stay working.

So I'm working from home today and doing the full $dayjob breaking-news production routine (anything that nine websites throws at me plus other assorted sundries) in Fedora 20 with Xfce 4.10. When I'm at the office, I usually split the load between a monster ThinkCentre machine (8 GB RAM, AMD CPU with 4 cores) running Windows 7 and this less powerful laptop with Fedora/Xfce (3 GB RAM, AMD APU with 2 cores).

But today I only have the laptop.

First, my latest software change: It's been getting more and more difficult to run the AMD Catalyst driver in Fedora. For the past month and then some, running Google Chrome would crash X if I didn't start it with just the right command switch. Then Firefox started crashing X if I opened up certain web sites in a new tab. File that under "time to ditch Catalyst."

Sure his reasons for ditching e-mail make sense, but what makes the article value is that Knoll mentions more than a few services that Primeloop is using to replace e-mail and help his team collaborate and communicate.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around what these services do and how/why to use them, but so far Slack and Hackpad look extremely promising for "situations," I find myself in.

It's not lost on me that the context of this article is a startup company leveraging the work of other startup companies, with all of that work being proprietary and hosted by said companies and not available for self-hosting at all. Even if a service is web-based, it's nice to have the option of loading it up yourself, on your server (or rough equivalent), and controlling it without a company getting in the way.

But a compelling service that fulfills an acute business need (or three) is well worth looking into and possibly adopting if that need is real (and unfulfilled). If/when the startup responsible for the product is acquired and said product is Hoovered up into the mothership, that's another problem, I guess.

I still see people installing new Linux distributions, one after the other, on their "production" laptops and desktops. I don't.

Sure, I fire up live images via USB or old-timey CD/DVD fairly regularly.

But I almost never do full, bare-metal installs on hardware I'm actually using. And I got rid of most of my PC boneyard, though I still have a 1999-era Compaq laptop (running Debian Squeeze LTS) and now a recently returned (from my daughter) 2002-era Thinkpad R32 (choking on Lubuntu 14.04 and in need of something new).

As far as "modern," equipment goes, all I have is my "production" laptop, an early-2013 HP Pavilion g6-2210us. And ever since I had the time to set up a Windows-Linux dual-boot, I've been running the same Fedora installation, upgraded via Fedup from F18 through F20.

Given that this is new, cheap AMD hardware, it's been a bit bumpy along the way. But the speed of updates in Fedora means that new kernels and drivers (theoretically) provide the latest drivers that are the lifeblood of any new, not-yet-supported hardware.

Fedora's motto is "Freedom. Friends. Features. First." I'm here to tell you Fedora lives up to that billing. Why do I say this now? I've just had another positive experience with Fedora, this time in finding a bug in my system, adding my information to an existing bug report and now seeing updated packages pushed to the Fedora 20 stable repositories and onto my system, where the problem has been fixed.

This all started a few weeks ago. After an update of the wine software that allows Linux users to run many Windows programs, many of the fonts in both the Firefox and Chrome web browsers started to look horrible. I narrowed it down to anything resembling Arial and Helvetica.

After searching for information, I found a command that would tell me what the system was using when asked to display a certain font:

$ fc-match -v arial | grep file

Now that the problem has been fixed, the output is different, but at the time it clearly showed that a wine-installed Arial font had been installed in my system's decidedly non-wine (aka "normal") font path.

And that font was hideous.

Many web sites, including the Fedora Forum and Gmail, looked like hell with that horrible Arial font. When Gmail looks horrible, you know there's a problem.

I began searching for other Fedora users who might have this same problem and came across this bug report on wine-courier-fonts overriding the system Courier font. In that bug report was this Aug. 9, 2014 comment by Arun Raghavan:

This also seems to apply to the arial font which makes things in Firefox look weird as well.

I know there's disagreement about whether Wine fonts should be made available as system fonts, but, irrespective of that, this affects the existing user experience, so ideally shouldn't have been included in a stable update.

The next day Michael Cronenworth wrote that he was pushing an update to wine that would take the fonts out of the system path:

The Font SIG has allowed us to remove Wine fonts from the system path. I'll be pushing a 1.7.24 update shortly to address this.

A few days after that, the update was available in the testing repository. I waited for it to make its way into Fedora 20 Stable, which it did today. In the course of today's Yum (in my case the GUI Yumex) update, new wine packages were installed on my system, and now everything looks great again in Firefox and Chrome.

Things do break in Fedora every once in a while, but not as often as you might think.

Pretty much every time something like happens on my system, even with the kernel, I've been able to either start a new bug report or chime in on an existing one. Soon thereafter, the wonderful developers who build packages for Fedora have addressed my problems and provided fixes that made those problems go away.

Chalk it up as another great experience with Fedora, both the Linux operating system and the community behind it.

Changing fonts in Ode is as easy as changing the .css file in the theme(s) you are using.

I've been having some trouble in Fedora with the Arial font, which looks like hell. The Wine non-emulator that runs Windows software in Linux brought an Arial font into my system, and it's just plain ugly.

I started looking at Arial and Helvetica not just in Linux but in Windows, too, and I decided that I don't like either one very much.

So I went into my CSS and killed out Helvetica Neue and Arial. Now Verdana and sans-serif, in that order, are the default fonts.

There is a new Ode-running site out in the wild. Announced on the existing Surface Markup blog is the Surface Markup development blog, which has one of the nicest themes I've ever seen on an Ode site. It's minimal, beautiful and responsive.

Designer/writer Hans Fast helped memake this site responsive, and I continue to thank him.

Jordi Mallach details in a post I found via Google Plus why GNOME should remain the default desktop environment in Debian Jessie despite the usual switch to Xfce prompted by a desire to keep the ISO image at CD size.

There's more. And it's not just image size: Most use Debian's netinstall image, which is always much smaller than a traditional data CD, and I think many if not most have access to a DVD drive or bypass optical media entirely for USB flash drives, so size doesn't matter as much as it might.

The dust-up over GNOME 3's controversial desktop is nothing new. Many will never like it. Cue irony: Windows 8, UI-wise, is as crazy as GNOME 3. They make the current Mac OS X desktop look positively old-school. That's probably drawing more to OS X than it is the other direction (to GNOME and Windows 8).

I've been running Lubuntu on my daughter's ancient IBM Thinkpad R32 for as long as I can remember. The upgrade from 12.04 to 14.04 was anything but smooth. I wasn't offered a straight 12.04-14.04 upgrade and instead went through the steps (12.10, 13.04, 13.10 and finally 14.04) when I probably should have just reinstalled with 14.04.

Now there's another problem. Wireless networking doesn't work. I even checked with the Lubuntu 14.04 live CD. And two different USB Wi-Fi adapters.

The system sees the networks, but it won't join them. And none of the "help" I found online was very helpful.

I could go back to the long-unsupported Lubuntu 14.04. Since this laptop has a CD drive only, that limits the live images I can try because many have climbed over CD size.

Lubuntu has not. And as I say above, I have tried it.

Fedora LXDE is also still CD-sized. I'm trying to download a torrent now. I'm doing the same with the Debian 7.6 netinstall image, from which I can whip up an LXDE system. Unfortunately Debian is a bit crapshootish because the Debian Live images are, again, too large for a CD.

I'd rather not go with Fedora, as this is OLD hardware. Debian's extra speed really shows in this situation (namely a Pentium 4 with 768 MB RAM).

I'm fairly confident I can return the Thinkpad to wireless-running usefulness. But I remain disappointed with Lubuntu (and maybe all of Ubuntu) for whatever it's doing to this old laptop's ability to complete a Wi-Fi connection.

I looked back in the archives and found out that I've been running Fedora on this particular laptop (HP Pavilion g6-2210us) for a year and two months.

Since this el-cheapo, about-$400 AMD laptop is NOT a top-of-the-line Intel-running Thinkpad, it hasn't gotten anywhere near the same level of love from the Linux kernel and driver developers.

But things have gotten better and better over time. And excepting the relentlessly rolling Arch Linux, things improve more quickly in Fedora than anywhere else. New kernels, drivers and applications, for the most part, fly onto Fedora systems via regular updates.

It appears I have switched for good. I've been meaning to write about this for some time, but I couldn't quite get the words right. I doubted I could express my frustrations in a constructive, helpful way, even if I think that my experiences are useful and my discoveries valuable, perhaps I would put them across in a way that seemed inciteful rather than insightful. I wasn't sure anyone cared. Certainly the GNOME community doesn't seem interested in feedback.

It turns out that one person that doesn't care is me: I didn't realise just how broken the F/OSS desktop is. The straw that broke the camel's back was the file manager replacing type-ahead find with a search but (to seemlessly switch metaphor) it turns out I'd been cut a thousand times already. I'm not just on the other side of the fence, I'm several fields away.

What can I say? With the Macintosh seemingly left for dead by Apple while the iPhone and iPad shovel in the revenue, Mac laptops have quietly become the platform of choice for developers everywhere.

Meanwhile, fragmentation in the Linux desktop space and what appears to be not just a lack of attention to detail but a willful rejection of it haven't helped.

Since I don't have $1,500+ for a laptop that won't accept OS updates in a few years and generally don't need to run the Adobe Creative Suite, I don't have the opportunity/burden of trying to figure out how much free (as in freedom) software I could shoehorn into a Macintosh OS X environment.

But I can see how developers who aren't Linux distro developers want to go for what's "easy," if not at all cheap.

While Ubuntu has in the past tried to court developers, the current direction in which they're taking Unity is more about mobile compatibility than desktop productivity. And I don't see any advantages for the average developer with GNOME Shell. Maybe GNOME Classic in an environment with a whole lot more configurability out of the box would work. I know that a more polished Xfce with a lot of the rough edges smoothed out could be popular.

But it's the fragmentation ...

I'd love for Fedora Workstation with its (I think) target audience of developers to fill this gap. But without a long-term support release, that won't happen. Maybe a CentOS "developer desktop" spin could do better.

The elephant. In the room. It's the same thing it always was: Preloads.

It's going to require a major hardware vendor to commit to developer-centric laptops in a variety of price ranges with dedicated, in-house developers making sure the hardware is 100-percent supported in Linux and on the Linux distribution shipping with that hardware. I'm not saying it will never happen. I hope it does.

Until then, Apple is going to eat everybody's lunch, including Microsoft's. And desktop Linux's, too.

I'm not saying that choice on the Linux desktop is bad. What I am saying is that a stable, functional, not-scary desktop with some heavy development attention and (dare I say it) substantial corporate support could turn the tide and bring not just developers but others (back) to Linux.

But as always with proprietary driver packages, there is a question as to whether or not they will work with a new Linux kernel.

Kernel 3.15.3-200 moved recently into Fedora 20, and I decided to make the leap into installing it today.

I can report that akmod-catalyst handled it perfectly. Catalyst works in 3.15.3, and everything is running as it should.

One of the touted features in kernel 3.15 is faster suspend/resume. Does using a proprietary video driver negate this speedup? I don't know.

I do periodically test suspend/resume with the open Radeon driver to see if I can ditch Catalys, but at this point I'll wait for live Fedora 21 (and Ubuntu 14.10) media for my next foray into the free driver.

I was a big, big fan of Stella 6 -- I really think it's the only way to run CentOS on the desktop without pulling your remaining hair out. Nux has packages of just about everything you're missing in stock RHEL/CentOS. And for those who haven't really looked into it, RHEL/CentOS is missing a lot.

Stella isn't so much a derivative distro as it is a spin on CentOS that includes all the extra repositories you need to replicate the desktop experience of, say, Fedora, but in the supported-just-about-forever world of RHEL/CentOS.

I'd like easy file-encryption from the file manager in Fedora (and every other version of Linux, for that matter).

I'd prefer that encryption be strictly password-based and not dependent on encrypted keys that I might lose, but encryption with keys that I have safely backed up offsite is better than no encryption at all, so I'm going to try using the GNOME application Seahorse to try this out.

I'll even ignore that I'm not using GNOME and instead relying on the Thunar file manager in Xfce.

But I do have a full GNOME environment installed, and I'd use it more if GNOME would run under the AMD Catalyst driver in Fedora 20. That it does not should be a much bigger deal than it appears to be among the greater Linux user base.

Anyway, I do have Nautilus, and to make Seahorse work in that file manager, Fedora offers the seahorse-nautilus package. I installed it just now and will be giving it a try in the very near future.

Update: After installing seahorse-nautilus, it is possible to encrypt files via right-click in Nautilus, but there is no right-click option to decrypt a file.

There is a Fedora 17-era bug on this issue, which appears to have been resolved.

An answer on Ask Fedora provided a workaround, but I'm reluctant to try it at this time, though I should probably look into it for help in creating a "custom action" in Thunar so I can encrypt/decrypt directly from my chosen Linux file manager.

I pulled the AMD Catalyst driver from my Fedora 20 system to do some tests. Among the things that started working: The Google Chrome web browser, which in recent weeks kills X while running under the proprietary driver.

It turns out that Google Chrome runs fine with the open Radeon driver.

"I don't remember ever having anything on Ubuntu One, though I'm sure I played with it a bit," I thought.

Well today I went over there, reset my password and looked in on my Ubuntu One account. I've got a ton of stuff in there.

Mind you, it's all stuff I have on my hard drive, and I haven't run Ubuntu proper since 2010, according to the file timestamps, so I'm just going to let it all fade away when Ubuntu One sunsets for good at the end of July 2014.

That didn't work for me. The stopper was the "you need to do the exercises" part of the enterprise. While I had the time to do the reading, I had a lot of mental resistance to trying to hack at the exercises at the end of each chapter.

I know that doing the exercises in these books helps you "get" the concepts, but I just wasn't there yet.

Now that I'm a few chapters in, I want to start typing the book's programs into my local system, running them and playing around with them a bit. While that's less than going all in on the exercises, it's more than not touching the computer or using Perl at all.

I want to borrow books via the Los Angeles Public Library's Axis 360 service, which won't give you their DRM-laden ebooks without use of the Adobe Digital Editions software to take the small file you download (normally called URLLink.acsm) and use it as a kind of key to download the longer .epub book file.

And Adobe Digital Editions is not available for Linux.

But it can be installed with Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux systems.

I already have Wine installed on my Fedora Linux system so I can use the excellent IrfanView image editor that's written for Windows. While instructions on the installation of Wine might be useful, I don't want to go there for the purposes of this post. I'll just say that you should use your distro's package manager to install Wine, and in this particular instance, the version of Wine available in your distro's repositories should be sufficient. One thing I will tell you: Make sure you also install wine-mono (or whatever the package is in your system that includes the Windows version of Mono in Wine).

Back to installing Adobe Digital Editions in Linux via Wine.

A few people reported problems (a very few did not) with version 2.x. A few offered easy-to-byzantine workarounds to make Adobe Digital Editions 2.x work in Linux.

You are prompted at some point after installing Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) to either create an Adobe account or use the one you already have.

I already had an Adobe account, so I used that login and password and was quickly swimmming in the world of DRM-ed ebooks.

Wait, there's a problem

Huge problem. The DRM'd epub files that Axis360 puts out aren't compatible with the Amazon Kindle.

Sure, I could break the DRM and use Calibre to convert the files. But I don't want to do that. I'd rather get the books for the alloted loan period and have them somewhat gracefully disappear when the loan is up.

Editorial comment: It's not like the Amazon Kindle is some obscure device. It dominates the ebook market. Axis360 basically tells users of the dominant ebook readers to take a long walk off a short pier.

I've been dabbling in programming for awhile now. I've mostly stayed within the friendly confines of the Bash shell on my local Linux system and the Linux servers on which I run various scripts and services.

I've been meaning to get deeper into real programming, whatever that is, for at least a couple of years. I would say it hasn't happened, but to a small extent it has. Now I'm ready to take the next step.

So what did happen?

A couple of years ago, I began writing little Bash scripts to automate my rsync-driven backups. With these little one- to two-liners, I didn't have to remember the exact syntax to do the rsync backup correctly and remember where my "exclude" file was living.

I also had trouble with screen blanking in Debian Wheezy. I finally figured out how to fix the problem with xset, and wrote a little Bash script to automate that process.

I have also written a bunch of scripts to automate posting and create an archive of this Ode site. Among these Ode-related scripts is a local Perl program that generates an Indexette date stamp. You can copy/paste it into your post file, or call the script from within a text editor, which is what I do with Gedit.

It's still a simple two-liner, albeit with more than a dozen lines explaining what's going on.

About a year ago, I started a more complicated programming project at my day job.

So what do I do at this job? I work for a bunch of local news web sites. I push content. I create web pages in an arcane CMS. I create blogs in a common CMS (WordPress). I fix broken things and solve problems. I take things that are separate and mash them together.

The project, the thing I've wanted to do, was to script together data from various sources, more specifically election results for the nine web sites I work on.

I wanted to do it in Perl. But when I finally decided to do it, I just didn't have the chops. But I did know Bash, and I learned (or learned more) about such Unix/Linux utilities as wget, cat, cp and sed to turn my data into HTML pages I could generate with cron and iframe into my various web sites.

Thus far I've been re-reading "Learning Perl", this time noting things that will help me in my election-results project.

I'm somewhere in the 40s in terms of pages, and I'm making notes in the book -- it's a real book, not an ebook -- in pencil.

Search and replace is pretty much a core function in Perl, so I can safely say goodbye to sed.

Concatenation can be done with a dot (a .) between items, so that takes care of cat.

I would really like to pump data into an array and use Perl's foreach to process each line.

Grasping scalars and arrays is going to be key.

I'll have to look into grabbing data over HTML and bring it into the scalar or array. The LWP::Simple module looks like a good candidate for this. I could also use the full LWP.

I'd like to code a date stamp into the data. I've already experimented with that in Perl for my Indexette date-stamper script.

Eventually I'll need to write the results out to files on the web server. That shouldn't be too hard.

I'm very confident about Fedora being in good hands as the Fedora.Next project begins remaking what the distribution is for those who both use and produce it.

That Fedora is stretching its own particular envelope and remaking itself for the desktop, server and cloud is huge. And having Matt -- a longtime Fedora contributor -- at the helm is very reassuring indeed.

Ode does not use a database to store content. Instead, every entry exists on the web server as a "flat" text file.

Comments are managed via Disqus, integrated through the work of Ode project leader Rob Reed.

E-mail: steven (at) stevenrosenberg dot net.

Who am I

and why am I here?

My name is Steven Rosenberg. Most of what I write these days has something to do with technology. I'm not an "early adopter." I think before I leap. I've got a lot of old hardware, and I like making it work.

My main computer runs the Fedora distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.

Right now I'm using the Xfce desktop environment. I'm OK with GNOME 3 but am very happy with Xfce at the moment.

In the past, from distant to recent, I've run OpenBSD, Ubuntu and Debian on the desktop. I also run Windows 7 rather heavily as well as a very little bit of Windows 8.

I'd like to write less about technology and more about other aspects of life and work. We'll see how that plays out.